I used to be a server at a restaurant-style cafeteria in an assisted living facility. We were horribly understaffed, so I would get there early and bust my ass bringing plates out as quickly as possible to the extremely uncomfortable, frustrated elders. It took a long time and this happened to them at every meal of every day. Older people have shortened wait times they can stand, and it can cause them untold pain that may be hard for others to empathize with but is all too sharp.
The way they felt, the mounting hunger frustration, the feeling of watching other people eat and drink while they waited, was relentless torment for their beleaguered nervous systems, and that horrible fucking company (Brookdale, who functionally tortured and killed people and was sued for only a small fraction of the deaths) did that to thousands of beaten down elders every day.
The feeling of actively waiting a long time for food is a feeling most people do not see as a big deal unless they're literally currently experiencing it, and even then they only value it for themselves. Suffering can be hard to imagine when you're not undergoing it. So I hope that people reading this will be able to place the kind of experience I'm even talking about. But those seniors knew.
One woman simply screamed. Constantly. Loudly. As if she were in hell. Both in the cafeteria and in her room waiting for help. She just, screamed and screamed and screamed while no one did anything until we could get to her because we were going at full speed helping everyone we could as fast as possible. The sound of her tortured screams while no one helped her was truly haunting.
Something even worse than her screams, far worse, still haunts me from those awful days. One day I came in to learn that a Black woman died there by bleeding out during dialysis because the person who was supposed to be supervising dialysis was too busy helping other people until it was too late. The next staff meeting after the woman's death was bright plastic and cheery. She used to yell without intelligible words because she was disabled. No one helped her communicate so she was denied access to communication. When she screamed as she died, staff chalked it up to her supposed belligerence -- a racist assumption stoked by the horrific material conditions -- right up till after her last breath. The company ground her body down into the dirt and then spat on it, as she died waiting bleeding.
These elders were people who received two or three meals a day plus snacks and they still suffered immensely every day, in perpetual wait mode, waiting for adequate care that never came.
Now please, if you will do me the favor of expending the empathy, imagine being twenty and waiting indefinitely and uncertainly for food and water while clinically starving to death, so malnourished you no longer recognize yourself or your former life, your starvation screaming an inescapable song of death inside you at all times. You can't find a moment of relief in a nap because your "tent," a fragile structure of sheets, is flooded with a foot of cold muddy water. You're rationing out for your whole family a little water and bites of the same miserable kind of bread you've been living off of for two years, experiencing a kind of suffering the depths of which you had never dreamed of before.
You used to lie in your bed bedrotting while scrolling Tiktok, eating snacks, listening to music, and playing games. You used to stress about friendship drama and getting good grades. You used to play soccer and do all the carefree things a young person should have access to. Now you would give anything for a few bites of chicken and something to take the edge off the bitter cold. Instead of nesting in your bed behind a door plastered with posters, you're constantly outdoors even when inside the flapping, flimsy flooding "tent" under a sky of bombs day and night. You can no longer walk or even really stand.
Eventually a donor you've befriended starts consolidating people's donations into $60 payments that come in weekly, about half of which reaches you after banking fees. Almost no one else donates. The thirty or so bucks coming in each week is so much less than you need, but it is literally the only thing keeping you and your shattered family alive.
As the months go on and the $60 payments have been coming in almost every week, on almost always the same day, the feeling of knowing that payment will likely be there every week has become one of the only stable, good things in your life. Every payment injects life into each member of your family -- your frail body, your parents', your brother's, and your sisters', including your five-year-old little sister's sickly body you are watching slowly die. All your bodies are slowly dying. The oldest able-bodied person in the family is now your little brother, who is seventeen and should be out having fun with his friends instead of risking his life running famine errands for his whole family. You and your parents are too weak to do it. You're dying but you have this rock to cling to in the quicksand of starvation and assault.
While the weekly $60s are a rock, the rock shifts unpredictably. No one, including the sender, knows what day it will come in. Occasionally it's ten days between payments instead of seven -- three whole days of the dreadful waiting. Each Sunday, your whole tortured family sits around with emaciated bodies, waiting all day long for the $60 to hopefully come.
The weekly feeling of waiting for that $60 -- for even an hour after the designated time, let alone days -- is torture. It's torture you feel profoundly helpless to even convey to donors, much less do anything about. There isn't anything to do except hope.
This is not hypothetical. This is the life right now, as you're reading this, of my chosen family little brother Moneer and two dozen other malnourished people in his and Neveen's families who were supposed to receive their emergency food stipends Saturday night at midnight. The two other families are somewhat less malnourished but also undergoing profound suffering without much food or shelter. Manal's family has been waiting for their meager monthly $60 since before the end of Nov, and Queen Naomi's family -- stateside and stalked by death and dysphoria -- is still waiting on the second half of their $60 for Nov as well.
These weekly and monthly $60s have always been technically more ambitious than my program (which is to say my and your fundraising efforts and donor base for these four families) is equipped to handle, but we have conquered the task anyway almost every week. There was like one week we had to skip due to lack of funds, and some weeks there were the devastating delays described above, but we have collected and distributed the $60s every week for a number of months this year. We're a huge part of why these over two dozen people are still alive.
Layla -- my girlfriend, a homeless trans woman of color who has been doing mutual aid for homeless Black trans women for five years and moves thousands of dollars a month for them -- advises me on my program, and she taught me not to take on more recipients than I can give a meaningful amount to, not to give more one week/month than I can give the next, and to try to hold back some as a surplus. She talks about donation money coming in as water. You consolidate the donations into a trickle, then a stream, and then a river so you can divert the river into steady streams per recipient. Holding back a surplus gives you control over the river so you can send out regular payments that come in on time.
Layla advises only adding a second recipient family after you build up a substantial surplus. It's not set in stone, just a guide that helps keep the river coursing strong so your recipients don't have to worry about you missing a payment.
My program has no surplus and struggles to come up with every $60 we send, leading to these tormenting delays. I took on four recipient families because I couldn't let these families die. The fourth family I added was Moneer's because I couldn't let my literal brother and his family starve to death. I chose the $60 goals based not on the capacity of the donor base but on the needs of the families.
Again: we don't really comprise the donor base, of which I am a part, to get these $60s done. We get it done every week and month anyway by the skin of our teeth because we've got grit and we believe in the work we're doing, our labor power.
A lot of people come together to make these $60s happen, and you are the people this post is dedicated to. The working-class people who choose to go without food for a day to bring relief to tortured little girls in Gaza and their families, and to a tortured Black trans woman trying to survive transmisogynoir, hunger, and homelessness on the East Coast. The people who have nothing to give but figure out ways to anyway.
Let's figure out ways to get these four late regularly-scheduled $60s wrapped up and sent by Tuesday. We've got four families who've been waiting on it since Saturday night, and we're determined like hell to get it done.
And then let's keep trucking on the coming $60s so we can eliminate delays, develop a surplus, and eventually, increase the $60s to a more survivable number. Just $10 or $20 more per family will allow them to buy foods other than bread. Moneer messaged me overjoyed the other week because his family was able to eat chicken the other day for the first time in forever due to a generous donor. The food is there in the markets now, we just need to raise a little more to get it and the families are waiting for that day.
To maintain and build on these $60s, let's expand our donor base. Especially, we need people to commit to $1 or more a month, even if some months they can't.
Yes, many donors give a literal dollar or two per month. Something else Layla taught me is that these microdonations are extremely valuable. They are more sustainable for many working-class people, which is good for the donors because it doesn't break the bank and is good for the program because it means the donors won't have to suddenly stop due to financial strain. It also means my program can recover more easily from losing that donor. Many hands make light work, and many small donations (plus the blessed bigger donations) add up to the total monthly goal of about $640 (with the total goal depending on the number of weeks in that month). $640/month will be easy for us to keep up this way.
Put another way, let's say 100 people have very little left over after rent and bills each month. They each have $1 they could give, but they don't want to give such a small amount, whether out of embarrassment, a desire for control (that's a whole thing to get into), or the myth that $1 won't do anything. So none of the 100 people give $1. So the $100 that could have come from them never comes together to feed and shelter these families. All it would have taken is those people giving one dollar.
So this is a call to the givers, and a letter of deep gratitude to those who do. Send in something, send in even $1. Let's get this done and put an end to the torturous wait over two dozen people are experiencing right now for emergency food.
Over two dozen lives are depending on it, and we're the badasses doing it. 🔥
Put a star ⭐ emoji in the notes:
Moneer: @lion-5 GazaVetters #8
Manal: @manal-ghorab99 GazaVetters #184, The ButterflyEffect Project #1117
Neveen al-Najjar: Her Facebook. Confirmed here and elsewhere by Sidra Project organizer Elijah Packard to be neighbors of Omar al-Najjar #35 and thus vetted by association by the Sidra Project.
Queen Naomi: No contact info safe to give out. She's "vetted" as in she's been my personal close friend for years and I've seen her bloodied face after she got hate crimed on the street this summer.
This post is adapted from my Facebook, where I do my main fundraising. I collect donations at my pay links so I can consolidate them into set, regular payments equally across the four families. It cuts down a great deal on per-donation fees as well. But if you'd prefer to give directly to a recipient's GoFundMe go to their account. [Edit: To donate directly to Queen Naomi go to my Facebook and see the pinned post.]
Video of my sweet baby girl for tax, who made all of this possible.🌹
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